Forests as a starting point, their management and challenges
Updated by Yasunao Kobayashi on May 11, 2025, 2:05 PM JST
Yasuhisa KOBAYASHI
Alpha Forum, Inc.
President of Alpha Forum, Inc. and Steering Committee Member of the Platinum Forest Industry Initiative. Ltd. in 2011, taking advantage of the company's venture support program. In September 2023, he received the Wood Use System Research Association Award.
When considering the future of the forest economy, the starting point is the "field" of forestry. We interviewed Mr. Yasunao Kobayashi, President and CEO of Alpha Forum, Inc., who has a long career in this field, including a stint at Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc. and as a senior researcher at the Smart Forestry Working Group of the Platinum Initiative Network.
When I was at the Mitsubishi Research Institute, I moved from housing-related research to timber research, which may have trained me to think about timber, trees, forests, and the forestry industry as a whole from the perspective of end-use. At that time, Japan relied on old-fashioned standards for the quality of lumber used in construction, and standards that suited the current situation remained undeveloped. Meanwhile, foreign-made laminated wood, which was standardized, inexpensive, reasonably strong, and attractive, was rapidly entering the domestic market.
Faced with this situation, Mr. Kobayashi became aware of a crisis: "If we do not take steps to return to domestic timber, Japan's forestry industry will be in serious trouble. As he continued his research on rational design and building materials based on structural calculations, his consulting field expanded from the construction of wooden buildings to include a wider range of forest resources. He chose Europe, especially Austria, as a model for his work, as it is an advanced country in the forestry industry and imports most of its lumber.
Compared to Northern Europe, where forests are located on the plains and can be logged and transported from one end of the country to the other without building forest roads, most of Austria's forestry is conducted on the eastern slopes of the Alps. The conditions are similar to those in Japan, but on a much larger scale. Every year, nearly 25 million cubic meters of forest is cut down and planted as much as it grows to the point where it can be shipped, and the people who work there are energetic and proud of their work. Children ride along with their parents on the big harvesters (machines for felling, pruning, and cutting down branches), and their eyes light up when they hear, "I'm going to be in the forestry business too! I'm going to do forestry too!
Mr. Kobayashi's impression of the forestry industry, which is efficient, sustainable, and different from that of Japan, with its workers working with vigor and vitality, is that "the circulation of forests is the circulation of people. Unless the trees as a resource are moved and the entire community centered on the forest is revitalized, a truly sustainable "forestry revival" will not succeed.
At that time, I was approached by one of my colleagues from my days at Mitsubishi Research Institute and asked if I could help revitalize a town in my home prefecture of Fukui Prefecture through a biomass-based heat supply business! I jumped at the chance and started "Morimori Biomass Co. I took the founding members to Austria for a tour and training, and we decided to copy what they had done, and so it has been eight years since we started. We have been doing everything locally, from forest management with the involvement of the forestry cooperative, to the transportation of wood, to chipping and heat supply, and we have been consistently making a profit since the first year.
The project is an "all-Fukui" private-public partnership, with Alpha Forum in charge of overall consulting, including local financial institutions, and the local government serving as an observer. Chips from unutilized timber (timber left after thinning or main cutting), mainly from secondary forests of cedar and hardwood trees, are used as fuel to supply heat to hotels and other facilities by installing hot water boilers, and consumers purchase "heat energy" from the heat. In addition, by renewing aged and degraded forests through afforestation, the CO2 emitted from the heat supply is absorbed.
The reason we chose to specialize in biomass as a heat source was because we felt that power generation, which involves significant losses during transmission and other processes, cannot balance CO2 emissions. However, the issue is the stable supply of chips, and we realized that the key to securing this supply is the mountains and forests. Therefore, from 2024, in Toyama Prefecture, also in the Hokuriku region, we are participating in a project to fully utilize the forests in the western part of the prefecture, centering on Takaoka City.
As a core member of the prefectural government-led Western Toyama Forest Utilization Study Council, Mr. Kobayashi is actively involved in the "upstream" side of the project, which he was not directly involved in the "Morimori" project. He says that what he is strongly promoting is the creation of a system that (1) consolidates mountains and forests, (2) facilitates self-lumbering by motivated contractors, and (3) ensures that money goes back to the local community.
Forestry is not a viable business unless it can be planned on a large scale at the 1,000-hectare level. However, today, a significant portion of the forests are planted after the 1970s, and such mountains are not thinned out due to price competition with foreign timber, leaving them in a state of disrepair. Especially in villages close to human settlements, elderly owners are not willing to sell their land at a reasonable price, and where younger generations have inherited the land, the inheritance rights are complicated, and some say, 'I don't know how much of the land is our mountain.
In response to this situation, the Forest Management and Control Law, which went into effect in 2019, allows municipalities to delegate forests that remain unmanageable due to unknown ownership to willing and able contractors, but when the time comes, municipalities are often hesitant to do so for fear of violating ownership rights.
The registration fee is to be paid by the company, and the management of the forest is supposed to be a good thing for the local community, as it will help them to make better use of the neglected forests. In reality, ownership of as little as 1 hectare or 0.5 hectare often becomes a "barrier. Even though there should be no unnecessary infringement of rights, I feel it is necessary to create more momentum and a common understanding in the community that mountains and forests are public resources.
To begin with, Japan's forestry industry is characterized by sloping terrain, and logging and transportation have been major hurdles to overcome. The problem of ownership of satoyama (a wooded area in the countryside) has made it necessary to go to the trouble of cutting down trees in the backcountry, and building forest roads for work on a kilometer-by-kilometer basis would not be in keeping with the scale of the forestry industry.
To achieve this, it is important to build up the fact that the forestry industry is profitable, one by one. In terms of technology, we would like to promote efficiency and cost savings to encourage the entry of motivated independent logging companies by introducing tower yarders with overhead wires that enable efficient transport without forest roads, and leasing equipment, instead of the conventional vehicle-based harvesters. We would like to promote efficiency and cost reduction. In terms of lumber production, we should consider buying laminated wood and other building materials and furniture materials, rather than the high-cost slicing of large logs that is only required for Japanese-style rooms, so that money can be saved.
In addition, in the Hokuriku region, centered on western Toyama Prefecture, Mr. Kobayashi is planning a "forest finance" program in which forest owners are asked to put their forests in trust and return the profits generated by the trust, within a framework that also includes trust banks.
"It is not just a dividend either, but a limited liability company, in which urban petroleum- and chemical-related companies will be the core of the anonymous partnership, will own the trust beneficiary rights. The mechanism is to include CO2 emission rights in the dividends to investors. In this way, each hectare would absorb 8 tons of CO2 per year. ...... If we subtract the amount of CO2 emitted by the heavy machinery used for the work, we would still have enough for about 7 tons, which would be 70,000 yen per year in a relative transaction. We don't need emission credits, so we just need to collect mountains from mountain owners and get serious about revitalizing the forestry industry."
The basis of Mr. Kobayashi's ideas is his desire to make the local economy, with community at its core, the future of Japan, through satoyama capital represented by forestry.
In the forestry industry, the majority of the cost is transportation. In addition, transportation places a heavy burden on the environment. The current situation where people and goods are concentrated in Tokyo means that a large amount of CO2 is emitted to transport them. Electric cars and hydrogen cars are called "electric cars" and "hydrogen cars," but if we take their production costs into consideration, even if they were to be driven 700,000 km, they would still not be suitable for this purpose. It may sound a bit extreme, but the time is coming soon when people will feel ashamed to live in Tokyo, a city that emits huge amounts of CO2 in exchange for its excessive consumption of food, energy, and skyscrapers. I think that means that only a minority of people are aware of this.
I would like to see the Platinum Forest Industry Initiative make non-discriminatory proposals, such as setting targets for the ideal supply chain and forest conservation area with a view to becoming carbon neutral (CN) by 2050, based on objective research data that has been accumulated," said Kobayashi, who is also involved in the secretariat. Mr. Kobayashi answered from his position as a member of the secretariat.
I hope that everyone involved will come to the mountains to see what is happening there. I hope that the Forum's activities will be fruitful only when they see the logging site, the lumbering process, the actual transportation process, and the way prices are set (......)."
To conclude, he did not forget to give a rather strict "order.
